My mother’s youngest sister was living in our home before I was born. We didn’t give a name to the arrangement, but in my heart this aunt has always been my big sister.

Indian child welfare wisdom encourages us to recognize customary adoption* and other legal options that create permanent and safe family bonds without terminating all legal rights of birth parents.

In 2010 the adoption community is treating this as a new discovery, though the established Indian culture has endorsed it for many generations.

There are lots of families of many ethnicities who do this. Some have arrived at formal guardianship arrangements. Sometimes the families simply do it themselves, without arrangements ceremonially established by a tribe or government leader. Aunts and uncles step forward to help raise children who are victims of parental neglect, dug misuse, or incarceration of their parents.

Sometimes close friends of the family who feel like relatives are the ones who step forward to raise the children – as their own, but without denying the ties to birth family.

Many people in their fifties and sixties are raising their grandchildren. A recent news article reported 6,000 such families in Montana alone.

According to the Chicago Tribune, 4.7 million children in the United States were being raised in households headed by their grandparents.

Customary adoption? Modification of parental rights? Co-parenting? I don’t care what we call it. I just think we should allow for cultural and legal avenues that encourage us to do whatever the children need for us to do.